The Photo-Secession actively promoted its ideas. Stieglitz edited and published the important quarterly Camera Work and opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (also known as “291,” the gallery’s address on Fifth Avenue), providing a place for the members to exhibit their work. In 1910 the Photo-Secession sponsored an international show of more than 500 photographs by its members or by photographers whose aims were similar to its own. The show, occupying more than half of the exhibition space at the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Gallery) in Buffalo, New York, was a sensation and significantly advanced the acceptance of photography as an art form.

By 1910, however, the members of the Photo-Secession had become divided. Some continued to manipulate their negatives and prints to achieve nonphotographic effects, while others came to feel that such manipulation destroyed tone and texture and was inappropriate to photography. Torn by this division, the group soon dissolved.

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method of recording the image of an object through the action of light, or related radiation, on a light-sensitive material. The word, derived from the Greek photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”), was first used in the 1830s.

Early in 1902 Stieglitz announced the existence of a new organization called the Photo-Secession, a group whose name was an allusion to the secessionist artist groups formed in Germany and in Austria in the 1890s and that, like its European counterparts, was designed to break away from stodgy and conventional ideas. Photo-Secession was dedicated to promoting photography as an art form. In fact,...

In 1900, before making the first of many extended trips to Europe, Steichen met Alfred Stieglitz, who bought three of the young man’s photographs at the not inconsiderable price of five dollars each. It was the beginning of a close and mutually rewarding relationship that would last until 1917. In 1902 Stieglitz invited Steichen to join him and other photographers, including Clarence H. White...